Loving The Sandbox, Missing The Fantasy

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I do love EVE Online, even if some online drama and paranoia over the last week or so made me wonder if I really have the energy to move to 0.0 right now. Application has been processed, roles dropped, assets liquidated and jump clones prepped (more or less) but seeing the true paranoid face of EVE's political alliances and corps is putting me off.
If I do the move I will end up in one of the most volatile areas of the cluster as well, straight into a war that will probably spiral ...

A Grand And Pretentious Love Declaration To EVE Online

In this special edition of the EVE Blog Banter, CrazyKinux himself asked "[w]hether you've logged into the game every day since its launch in 2003, or you've taken one or several sabbaticals from your capsuleer career, you've always come back to New Eden don't you. Why is that? [...] To put it simply: Why do you love EVE Online so much?"
The EVE Blog Banter invites an enthusiastic group of EVE Online bloggers to address--within a specified time period--a common topic related to EVE. The resulting articles may be short or long, funny or serious, but are always great fun to read! Direct ...

I’m In Your MMO, Reviewing Your Beta

Last time there was any talk about how to (or how not to) review MMOs was around the whole Eurogamer vs Aventurine debacle (often called "Zitrongate" after the reviewer). This was obviously a deep and traumatic event for some people, especially Darkfall fans that still can't stop taking cheap shots at Eurogamer (despite them doing a re-review of the game). To me, though, the question has crept back into the front of my mind, as I'm currently reviewing two MMOs at the same time.
[caption id="attachment_1524" align="alignright" width="154" caption="Ensign 418 of 666, codename "Squid", at your service."][/caption]
As I mentioned in my ...

Tag grtv

Following the tradition from last year in Leipzig, we did a show from the main showfloor at Gamescom this year. It’s me, a mic, my lovely camera man Emil and a lot of sweaty gamers. Hope you enjoy it, because these are always a blast to do.

I’m sorry for just doing another GRTV embedding, but I’ve spent the majority of last week in Germany covering Gamescom and I’ve had no time to do any blogging. I’ve had a blast, despite the stress, and I guess I’ll get back to both what I saw there and my initial thoughts on Cataclysm during the next couple of days. Until then, I leave you with the Starcraft II preview above. As I’ve mentioned before I went to LA a few weeks ago to check out the first single player campaign and this video has been under embargo ever since. In it me and Thomas have a discussion about innovation in games, especially in the RTS genre and how Starcraft II fits into that.

If you take the time to watch it, and please do, feel free to drop a comment and tell us what you think about the format we chose. We haven’t done a preview this way before, I am really satisfied with it, but I’d love to get some feedback on it. If people like it I think we’ll do more shows in this style – I personally prefer it a lot to our old content. In many ways GRTV is still in its cradle, but we are working hard to develop it as much as we possibly can. Thus feedback is always, always welcome.

I had the opportunity to sit down with CCP’s Nathan Richardsson during the Nordic Game Convention earlier this year. We talked a bit about the future of EVE, of course, and how CCP handled the economic crisis – something that Gamesindustry.biz made quite a bit of fuzz about a few days ago. Heh. Nathan is a great guy, although a bit hard to talk to sometimes. I hope to see him, and the rest of the EVE crew, at Gamescom next week.

Feels rather fitting that I’m wearing a Wanted: Weapons of Fate t-shirt during this interview, since Grin sadly closed their doors today. Not all that surprising, but always sad to see more people in the industry lose their jobs.

(If you want to embed the movie the information is at the end. There’s currently a bug somewhere so you have to shift the first height and width parameters around, though.)

I’ve had two fairly busy weeks, including the aforementioned trip with THQ to London and the annual Nordic Game convention here in Malmö. The trip to London was very nice, especially since most of it went so smoothly – the press event was held at the same hotel as we stayed at, so we more or less just had to leave it to head over to a restaurant in the evening. I’ve been to London so many times that I can’t really be bothered with actually walking around in it (except to visit Forbidden Planet and Atlantis Bookshop, my two favorite stores that are only three blocks away from each other), and since the hotel was only 5 minutes away from Victoria we didn’t even have to care about buses or the Tube. Too bad for Eirik, our camera guy, who had never been to London before.

We did get a bunch of interviews done there, including one with Joe Madureira – as an old Marvel and Image-fan, that was a bit of a nerdgasm right there. The interviews are currently being edited and should be online next week or so. Also got some hands-on with Darksiders, Joe’s upcoming game, which looks promising. We’ve seen the formulae before in games like Devil May Cry and God of War, but I think the visual design of Darksiders is so much better than in those two games. Will Porter from Eurogamer was there as well and he has penned down some first impressions of the game if you want to read more about it.

Then I had to spend the weekend more or less locked up in my apartment, reviewing The Sims 3…that review will go online June 1 (in Swedish) and should be in print around the same time (in Swedish, of course). It was a tight deadline, had the review code waiting for me when I got back from London, but I managed to get a lot of playtime in before the review was due.

Nordic Game this year was nice as well, even though I only had time to go to one of the lectures. We did get some interviews done there as well, and some pre-E3-stuff at the same time, and the big nerdgasm this year was getting to meet Suda51. I didn’t do that interview, in fact I only did one with Nathan Richardson from CCP, but I got to stand around and look like some form of GRTV-supervisor. I should had kept my sunglasses on inside and had a much sterner look…when the interview was done I did manage to get to use my Japanese to ask to take a photo of him before we had to get going – at least I still remember how to ask that. Expect the interviews to go online over the coming weeks.

I’ve also started to deal with some personal issues and things might actually look a bit brighter. Hopefully things will be more stable in general soon and give me an opportunity to some real restructuring of my life. It’s sorely needed and hopefully DFTM will be updated more frequently as a result. We’ll see.

With all this going on, and a wedding this weekend to plan for (I’m the Best Man, which means I need to finish writing that damn speech), I’ve hardly had any time for some good old MMO-gaming. I’ve promised Brendon to take a look at Rappelz, but the damn thing refuses to patch properly. I might strangle it soon. When this weekend is over I do hope I will have some time to just sit down and fix the darn game, as I really do want to give it a go. EverQuest II is also beckoning me back, I kinda miss my Gnomish berserker already.

I’ve been quite busy this week, been to a THQ-event in London for example, so there’s not been enough time to update DFTM or play any MMOs. I’ve also taken over Jennifer’s role at GRTV News, so I’m embedding my first show here. It feels a bit weird to see myself in this particular format, but it was fun to do and it will be exciting to see where we can take it from here.

Even though he’s trained for dealing with the press, I feel Craig is being quite humble during the course of the interview. That’s great, since I think people are much more inclined to try the game out again if the developers actually admit the major mistakes they did at launch instead of beating their chests.

I am sorry for how tired I look and sound in this video review of Dawn of War II. I was so sick that my knees were literally shaking underneath the table from just standing up for too long. And no comments on the hair please, I know it looks awful. I need a haircut, badly.

Me and Thomas Blichfeldt talk about thatgamecompany’s spiritual successor to Flow, Flower, on GRTV. I was so sick earlier this week and standing outside and filming…I guess my face shows exactly how I’m feeling.